Management Matters: Building Enterprise Capability
by
John Hunter
The book provides an overview for viewing management as a system. It is largely based on those of Dr. Deming, along with natural outgrowths or extensions of his ideas such as lean manufacturing and agile software development.
To achieve great results there must be a continual focus on achieving results today and building enterprise capacity to maximize results over the long term. Managers have many management concepts, pactices and tools available to help them in this quest. The challenge is to create and continually build and improve a management system for the enterprise that leads to success.
The book provides a framework for management thinking. With this framework the practices and tools can be applied to build enterprise capacity and improve efficiency and effectiveness.

The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality
by
W. Edwards Deming, Joyce Orsini
The book is filled with articles, papers, lectures, and notes touching on a wide range of topics, but which focus on Deming's overriding message: quality and operations are all about systems, not individual performance; the system has to be designed so that the worker can perform well.
Published in cooperation with The W. Edwards Deming Institute, The Essential Deming captures Deming's life's worth of thinking and writing. Dr. Orsini provides expert commentary throughout, delivering a powerful, practical guide to superior management. With The Essential Deming, you have the rationale, insight, and best practices you need to transform your organization.

An Accidental Statistician: The Life and Memories of George E. P. Box
by
George E. P. Box
From early childhood to a celebrated career in academia and industry, acclaimed statistician George E.P. Box offers personal insights and a first-hand account of his professional accomplishments in this insightful memoir. It features thoughts from more than a dozen researchers and practitioners on how Box shaped their careers; previously unpublished photos from Box’s personal collection; and Forewords written by two of Box’s closest colleagues and confidants. An Accidental Statistician is a charming, intimate account of a great intellect’s life that will appeal to math and engineering professionals.

Understanding A3 Thinking: A Critical Component of Toyota's PDCA Management System
by
Art Smalley, Durward K. Sobek
Winner of a 2009 Shingo Research and Professional Publication Prize. The A3 report has proven to be a key tool In Toyotaâ€™s successful move toward organizational efficiency, effectiveness, and improvement, especially within its engineering and R&D organizations. The power of the A3 report, however, derives not from the report itself, but rather from the development of the culture and mindset required for the implementation of the A3 system. In other words, A3 reports are not just an end product but are evidence of a powerful set of dynamics that is referred to as A3 Thinking.

Each necessary, but only jointly sufficient
by
John Allspaw
"for complex systems: there is no root cause.
...
Frankly, I think that this tendency to look for singular root causes also comes from how deeply entrenched modern science and engineering is with the tenets of reductionism. So I blame Newton and Descartes.
...
In the same way that you shouldnâ€™t ever have root cause 'human error', if you only have a single root cause, you havenâ€™t dug deep enough."

On Probability As a Basis For Action
by
W. Edwards Deming
"The aim here is to try to contribute something to the improvement of statistical practice. The basic supposition here is that any statistical investigation is carried out for purposes of action. New knowledge modifies existing knowledge. "
Deming distinguishes between enumerative studies and analytic studies. An enumerative study has for its aim an estimate of the number of units of a frame that belong to a specified class. An analytic study has for its aim a basis for action on the cause-system or the process, in order to improve product of the future.

Keys to the Effective Use of the PDSA Improvement Cycle
by
John Hunter
"The PDSA cycle is a learning cycle based on experiments. When using the PDSA cycle prediction of the results are important... The plan stage may well take 80% (or even more) of the effort on the first turn of the PDSA cycle in a new series. The Do stage may well take 80% of of the time - it usually doesn't take much effort (to just collect a bit of extra data) but it may take time for that data to be ready to collect."

Small Business Guidebook to Quality Management
The aim of this guidebook is to help small businesses make the transition to a quality culture. While the focus of the guidebook is small businesses the information is helpful to anyone transforming and continually improving their organization.

How Do We Know What We Know? - Deming's SoPK Part IV
by
John Hunter
"If we can break from such beliefs that are not useful in modern organizations, we can improve our decisions. Having a Deming-based theory of knowledge will help us break from those beliefs and it will help us be more thoughtful as we learn to question other management beliefs we hold (many of which simply are not useful - or cause harm).
Understanding the theory of knowledge within the context of the Deming's System for Managing helps us more effectively and consistently learn and improve the processes and systems we work with. "

A manifesto for reproducible science
"Here we propose a series of measures that we believe will improve research efficiency and robustness of scientific findings by directly targeting specific threats to reproducible science. We argue for the adoption, evaluation and ongoing improvement of these measures to optimize the pace and efficiency of knowledge accumulation. The measures are organized into the following categories methods, reporting and dissemination, reproducibility, evaluation and incentives. They are not intended to be exhaustive, but provide a broad, practical and evidence-based set of actions that can be implemented by researchers, institutions, journals and funders."

Using Design of Experiments as a Process Road Map
by
Davis Balestracci
"The current design of experiments (DOE) renaissance seems to favor factorial designs and/or orthogonal arrays as a panacea. In my 25 years as a statistician, my clients have always found much more value in obtaining a process "road map" by generating the inherent response surface in a situation."

How to Get Lucky
by
George E. P. Box
"Some principles for success in quality improvement projects discuss, in particular, how to encourage die discovery of useful phenomena not initially being sought. A graphical version of the analysis of variance which can help show up the unexpected is illustrated with two examples."

Executive Superstars, Peer Groups and Over-Compensation – Cause, Effect and Solution
"theories of optimal market-based contracting are misguided in that they are predicated upon the chimerical notion of vigorous and competitive markets for transferable executive talent...
independent and shareholder-conscious compensation committees must develop internally created standards of pay based on the individual nature of the organization concerned, its particular competitive environment and its internal dynamics."

The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science
"We're not driven only by emotions, of course—we also reason, deliberate. But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum. Rather, our quick-fire emotions can set us on a course of thinking that's highly biased, especially on topics we care a great deal about.
...
a large number of psychological studies have shown that people respond to scientific or technical evidence in ways that justify their preexisting beliefs"

Variation, So Meaningful Yet So Misunderstood
by
Lynda Finn
"assuming an issue is the result of a special cause will send you on a hunt for the special cause. Walter Shewhart and Deming proved that special cause thinking will lead you astray most of the time. So, if in your company there is often a search for whom or what is to blame before questioning whether the problem is built into the current processes and systems, then you too are likely wasting time and misidentifying causes."

Maximize Test Coverage Efficiency And Minimize the Number of Tests Needed
by
John Hunter
"The steeper the slope the more efficient your test plan is. If you repeat the same tests of pairs and triples andâ€¦ while not taking advantage of the chance to test, untested pairs and triples you will have to create and run far more test than if you intelligently create a test plan. With many interactions to test it is far too complex to manually derive an intelligent test plan. A

Response surface methods and sequential exploration
by
Ron Kenett, David M. Steinberg
"A typical response surface study begins with a screening experiment to identify the most important factors. Small, orthogonal experimental plans and simple regression models are usually used for screening (see our second and third blog posts in this series). Subsequent experiments will depend on the results of the screening experiment. For example, factors that had small effects might be dropped from further consideration. Other factors might be added. The team might decide to shift the levels of some of the factors to get better results for the critical quality attributes (CQA’s). If the results suggest that a first-order model is no longer a good fit to the data, the team expands the design to permit fitting a second-degree regression model."

An Accidental Statistician
by
George E. P. Box, R.A. Fisher
"At one point I was having trouble with a statistical problem. A very senior scientist suggested that I contact R. A. Fisher, who asked me to come and see him. The Army did not know how to send a sergeant to see a professor, so they made a railway warrant that said I was taking a horse to Cambridge. It was a beautiful day. Fisher said "let's go and sit under that tree in the orchard, I'll look up the probits and you look up the reciprocals". The specific problem was soon solved and set me thinking about estimating data transformations."

American Statistical Association (ASA) Statement on Statistical Significance and P-Values
"Practices that reduce data analysis or scientific inference to mechanical “bright-line” rules (such as “p < 0.05”) for justifying scientific claims or conclusions can lead to erroneous beliefs and poor decision making. A conclusion does not immediately become “true” on one side of the divide and “false” on the other. Researchers should bring many contextual factors into play to derive scientific inferences"

It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings
by
Jason Yip
"It is too easy to confuse effort with work. The stand-up should encourage a focus on moving work through the system in order to achieve our objectives, not encourage pointless activity.
...
Post raised obstacles to an Improvement Board. This is a publicly visible whiteboard or chart that identifies raised obstacles and tracks the progress of their resolution. An Improvement Board can be updated outside of stand-ups and serves as a more immediate and perhaps less confronting way to initially raise obstacles."

Do Interactions Matter?
by
George E. P. Box
"It has recently been argued that in an industrial setting the detection and elucidation of interactions between variables is unimportant. In this report the contrary view is advanced and is illustrated with examples."

Statistics for Discovery
by
George E. P. Box
This report explores why investigators in engineering and the physical sciences rarely use statistics. It is argued that statistics has been overly influenced by mathematical methods rather than the scientific method and consequently the subject has been greatly skewed towards testing rather than discovery.

Robustness in the Strategy of Scientific Model Building
by
George E. P. Box
"All models are wrong but some are useful
...
The iterative building process for scientific models can take place over short or long periods of time.
...
It should be remembered that just as the Declaration of Independance promises the pursuit of happiness rather than happiness itself, so the iterative scientific model building process offers only the pursuit of the perfect model."

How to Get a New Management Strategy, Tool or Concept Adopted
by
John Hunter
"Often when learning about Demingâ€™s ideas on management, lean manufacturing, design of experiments, PDSAâ€¦ people become excited. They discover new ideas that show great promise to alleviate the troubles they have in their workplace and lead them to better results. But how to actually get their organization to adopt the ideas often confounds them..."

Charlie Munger on the Psychology of Human Misjudgement
"Early in the history of Xerox, Joe Wilson, who was then in the government, had to go back to Xerox because he couldn’t understand how their better, new machine was selling so poorly in relation to their older and inferior machine. Of course when he got there he found out that the commission arrangement with the salesmen gave a tremendous incentive to the inferior machine.
...
you really get extreme dysfunction as a corrective decision-making body in the typical American board of directors. They only act, again the power of incentives, they only act when it gets so bad it starts making them look foolish, or threatening legal liability to them. That’s Munger’s rule. I mean there are occasional things that don’t follow Munger’s rule, but by and large the board of directors is a very ineffective corrector if the top guy is a little nuts, which, of course, frequently happens. "

The Art of Discovery
by
George E. P. Box, John Hunter
Quotes by George Box in the video:
“The scientific method is how we increase the rate at which we find things out.”
“I think the quality revolution is nothing more, or less, than the dramatic expansion of the of scientific problem solving using informed observation and directed experimentation to find out more about the process, the product and the customer.”
“Tapping into resources:
Every operating system generates information that can be used to improve it.
Everyone has creativity.
Designed experiments can greatly increase the efficiency of experimentation."

Actionable Metrics at Siemens Health Services
"This case study details how a shift from traditional agile metrics (Story Points, Velocity) to actionable flow metrics (Work In Progress, Cycle Time, Throughput) reduced Cycle Times, increased quality, and increased overall predictability at Siemens Health Services. Moving to a continuous flow model augmented Siemens’ agility and explains how predictability is a systemic behavior that one has to manage by understanding and acting in accordance with the assumptions of Little’s Law and the impacts of resource utilization."

Focus on Discovery, Not Decision-Making, Is Key To Success
by
Steven Spear
"The challenge is devising a new approach to managing systems so complex that 'thinking our way' to adequate, let alone perfect, designs is impossible. We are now in an age in which management must instead focus on constant discovery and innovation â€“ relentlessly learning better ways to do work and learning that there is better work to do.

Management Web Sites and Resources

Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections
by
John Hunter
The aim of Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections is to contribute to the successful adoption of management improvement to advance joy in work and joy in life.
The site provides connections to resources on a wide variety of management topics to help managers improve the performance of their organization. The site was started in 1996 by John Hunter.

Life and Legacy of William G. Hunter
by
John Hunter, William G. HunterGeorge Box, Stuart Hunter and Bill wrote what has become a classic text for experimenters in scientific and business circles, Statistics for Experimenters.
Bill also was a leader in the emergence of the management improvement movement. George Box and Bill co-founded the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Bill Hunter was also the founding chair of the ASQ statistics division.

Gemba Walkabout
by
Mike Stoecklein
“Gemba walk” (lean thinking term) to go to the actual place where value is added + “walkabout” (Australian aborigine) a short period of wandering bush life engaged as an occasional interruption of regular work.